Procrastinating, Kingdom Saving, and all other forms of Geekdom

SWFF: A Race To Danger Part 7

Once again, I found myself in my ship with a gun pointed at me. I looked over at Envy and asked, “Why is it that every time I open my ramp now, there’s some psychopath waiting there with a gun?”

When I woke back up, my jaw was hurting. Envy was sitting there shaking his head at me. “How did you possibly think that you’d get away with that,” he queried. “He was standing right next to you, you idiot.”

“Shut up.”

“By the way, the Trandoshan urinated on the ship a couple of times while you were knocked out.”

“Go clean it up.”

“Me? Why do I have to do it?”

“Because you’re a droid and you can’t catch anything that he might have.”

Envy looked over at the bounty hunter standing in the corner. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that, master.”

I watched as Envy walked off to, hopefully, do what I asked him to (Although I was actually wondering if the randomness of when he called me ‘Master’ actually meant something, as well. Maybe I’ll ask him about it one day. Or maybe I’ll have him disintegrated. Either way, I wouldn’t be wondering about it anymore). When he was gone, I turned to Turussk and asked, “Where’s Katellan?”

“Your pilot is fine,” he responded in Huttese. “I locked him in his quarters.”

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you and Nalith, but I swear I’m not trying to kill you. In fact, Nalith told me to make sure that you had the fastest swoop bike in the race.”

“Yes, you want it to go fast. That way when the bike breaks, I’ll be going fast enough that the crash will kill me.”

“I don’t want you to die (ok, that’s a lie), and I’m certainly not going to sabotage your swoop bike (not a lie).”

“I don’t believe you, human. You work for Nalith, who has always wanted me dead. He’s not good enough to do it himself, so he hires you to make it look like an accident.”

“My bikes don’t have accidents. I know that you looked me up before you came here. In the many years I’ve been working on swoop bikes, how many of my swoops have crashed due to anything other than pilot error?”

“None.”

“So, why would I break that trend just because Nalith told me to?”

“He threatened you. That’s how he gets most of his people to work for him.”

“True, he threatened me, but he told me I only had to do two things. He said all I had to do was make sure you had the fastest swoop and that I’d have to work on Teebo’s bike and make sure he had the slowest.”

“Do you really think Teebo will let you work on his bike after what you said about his mother?”

“How did you…”

“It is my business to know these things.”

At this point, I found myself tired of all of this. I was tired of being threatened by idiots with guns. I was tired of being told to do things I didn’t want to do. So, I put on a defeated expression (which wasn’t hard to do) and told the bounty hunter, “Look, whether you believe me or not, there’s only one way I have any chance of making it out of this alive and that’s working on your bike and you winning the race. If I work on the bike and you don’t win the race, you’ll kill me. If I don’t work on the bike, Nalith will kill me. So, either pull the trigger on that gun and get it over with, or send your bike over and I’ll start working on it.”

Turussk pulled the trigger. The safety was on, so all the blaster did was click. Somehow, I was able to maintain eye contact with him instead of jumping up and down screaming, “I’m still alive! I’m still alive!” What I did say was,

“When’s the bike going to be here?”

He smirked (at least I thought it was a smirk. It’s kind of hard to tell on a Trandoshan), turned, and walked away. Before he left the room, he said, “It’ll be here in the morning.”

I turned around only to find Envy standing right in my way. “I’ll bet you almost fooled him into thinking you weren’t scared out of your mind, Master,” he said. “Should I bring you a new pair of pants?”

“Shut up.” A pause. Then, “Yes.”

After I changed into a new set of clothes, my next order of business was getting drunk. Since bad things happen when I try to leave my ship, I decided that the safest thing to do was send Katellan out to procure my liquid intoxicant. That way, I didn’t even have to leave The Quick Fix in order to impair my ability to think.

When I woke up, I was happy to find that I was not suffering from a hangover. Katellan apparently helped me finish off my refreshments, as I found him passed out on the floor in the hallway in front of his room. I might have ‘accidentally’ kicked him as I stepped over him on my way to the garage. To my surprise, I walked in and Envy was already working on Turussk’s swoop bike. I was about to ask him what he had done to the bike already when he asked me something first.

“Master, may I ask you a question?”

“No.”

“Good. You, Master, are dull, tedious, and boring. (I may not be a master of language, but I’m still pretty sure that those are all the same thing.) The other fleshpiles you associate with, however, are fairly interesting. How did you accomplish this?”

I could’ve entered another pointless debate with Envy, but I kept my mouth shut and wondered why I hadn’t had Envy’s personality changed yet. The next few hours went by fairly quickly and we had almost the entire engine pulled apart. That’s when I noticed an odd rectangular metal box. It was not supposed to be there. My senses told me what this was, even if my brain didn’t know. I called Envy over to inspect it.